SPARC Operating System

Enterprises are under tremendous pressure to show stronger returns on their investment in IT, rolling out new business services faster, increasing processing and storage capacity while reducing space and power usage, and complying with new regulations. With Oracle Solaris, innovative built-in features deliver breakthrough virtualization and utilization, high availability, advanced security, and industry-leading performance.

Designed for Virtualization
Oracle Solaris offers the industries most cost effective and integrated virtualization solution encompassing a range of technologies as well as management and support offerings without additional costs. The virtualization technologies include both Oracle VM Server and Oracle Solaris Containers. Oracle VM Server follows the industry model of placing independent guest environments on a hypervisor architecture that supports Live Migration of guests between systems. Oracle Solaris Containers provide a different approach by providing independent and isolated virtual environments within a single OS instance.

Investment Protection
Oracle Solaris guarantees binary compatibility from release to release. Oracle Solaris Containers take compatibility one step further. To assist in rehosting legacy applications, Oracle Solaris Legacy Containers can host Oracle Solaris 8 and Oracle Solaris 9 applications in Oracle Solaris Containers on Oracle Solaris 10. The latter approach provides both application compatibility and environmental compatibility to ensure rehosting success. Taken together, running applications in Oracle Solaris Containers and as Oracle VM Server guests is the most effective way to guarantee application compatibility, to run older applications on the newest hardware, and to move applications between systems. Add in Oracle Solaris 11 and it is possible to consolidate 4 generations of Oracle Solaris on a single hardware platform: In the Oracle Solaris 10 Guest Domain it is possible to run any combination of Oracle Solaris 8, Oracle Solaris 9, and Oracle Solaris 10 Containers (Zones).

Designed for High Availability
Predictive Self Healing is a key feature in Oracle Solaris that helps increase system and service availability. It automatically detects, diagnoses, and isolates system and software faults before they cause downtime. To meet the highest application availability targets, Oracle Solaris Cluster is engineered to support a broad spectrum of Oracle technologies: applications, middleware, databases, systems, storage, and networking. It seamlessly connects all components and delivers orchestrated high availability and disaster recovery in traditional and virtualized IT environments, for local to geographically dispersed data centers.